NOAA Withdraws Proposal to Expand Speed Limit Zones for Endangered Whales

A federal plan to slow down boats to prevent collisions with endangered North Atlantic right whales recently hit the brakes. 

Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) withdrew a proposed set of rules that would have expanded existing vessel speed restrictions in certain waters across the U.S. Eastern Seaboard at times when the whales forage, mate and migrate each year. First proposed in 2022, the rule triggered a tidal wave of backlash from many boaters, fishers and the shipping industry, which claimed that the changes could hinder their businesses.

However, data shows that boat collisions are devastating right whale populations, representing one of the leading causes of death for the cetaceans alongside entanglements with fishing gear, an issue I’ve covered at length in the past. In recent years, the federal government has invested in a number of techniques to mitigate threats to the struggling species. Only around 370 North Atlantic right whales remain. 

A new investigation launched by an international trade commission last week will now evaluate whether the U.S. is failing its mandate to protect the endangered whale. 

Whale School Zones: Each year, NOAA Fisheries enacts a number of fixed “Seasonal Management Areas”—the equivalent of school zones for whales—along the eastern coast from Florida to Maine. 

However, a number of right whales continue to die each year from vessel strikes. So in 2022, NOAA proposed a modified set of vessel speed restriction rules that would expand seasonal speed restriction zones in some regions, create mandatory “dynamic slowdown zones” when a high number of whales are present in an area and require smaller vessels to follow speed restriction rules that already apply to large vessels. 

For more than two years, fishing and boating industry representatives fought for Congress to shoot down the potential expansion, while researchers and environmental groups urged the government to fast track it. Then, just a few days before President Donald Trump entered office, NOAA abandoned the proposal altogether. 

In a post on the Federal Register, the agency stated it “does not have sufficient time to finalize this regulation in this Administration due to the scope and volume of public comments,” of which there were roughly 90,000. 

“If NOAA Fisheries decides it is appropriate to issue regulations on this topic in the future, the agency will do so via a new rulemaking,” NOAA said in a statement to ICN. 

Withdrawal Fallout: Environmental groups such as Oceana and the Center for Biological Diversity decried the withdrawal. Meanwhile, industry members and their legal teams praised the decision.

“We think the rule is a really heavy-handed approach to a very worthy problem,” Braden Boucek, vice president of litigation at the Southeastern Legal Foundation, told me. The group, founded by conservative businessmen and a former Reagan administration official, filed a petition in November against NOAA’s existing speed restriction rules, which are still in place. Instead of speed limits, Boucek pointed to developing technology like sonar or thermal imaging as better solutions to prevent collisions.

The Biden administration allocated $20.1 million toward efforts to advance technologies and support that improve right whale detection and reduce vessel strikes. However, researchers and environmental groups I spoke to said that none of the tools in the works are currently effective enough to prevent collisions at a scale necessary to conserve the endangered species. 

“Protecting whales through measures known to be effective, like speed restrictions, and developing other approaches, including technology, to reduce vessel strike risk, are not mutually exclusive,” Jessica Redfern, the associate vice president of ocean conservation science at New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life, told me. “What’s critically important is that right whales survive long enough to benefit from those approaches.”

Redfern testified twice before the U.S. House of Representatives in support of the NOAA proposal. She said the withdrawal is a “serious setback to preventing the extinction of right whales,” adding that in the time since the changes were proposed, there have been at least four right whale deaths and five injuries due to vessel strikes in U.S. waters.

She also pointed to another issue complicating right whale conservation efforts: climate change. Warming ocean waters are altering the distribution of the whales’ main diet—tiny crustaceans known as copepods—and pushing the oceanic giants into new areas at different times of the year. 

Earlier in January, an aerial survey team spotted an unusually large aggregation of more than 75 right whales over southern Maine. To help prevent collisions, NOAA triggered a voluntary slow down zone for ships in the area. Maine’s Department of Marine Resources also sent a letter urging lobster fishers to move their gear from the area to avoid entanglements, which was a “great example of action being taken to protect these whales,” Redfern said. 

International Investigation: In October, scientists announced that the right whale population size climbed to 372 individuals in 2023, a slight uptick from the year before.

Despite this rare bit of good news, the species is still edging toward extinction—and an investigation launched by an international trade organization on Wednesday is now looking into whether the U.S. is doing enough to prevent it. 

In 2021, the nonprofit Oceana filed a submission to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation—part of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement that was established in 2018—that argued the U.S. was not meeting its mandate to protect the whales under federal environmental laws like the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Now, the trade commission is looking into these claims, which may take up to 120 days to complete. 

“We are enthusiastic that this objective investigation into what the United States is and is not doing to conserve North Atlantic right whales … will prompt the U.S. government to take action and improve the protections for right whales in U.S. waters,” Gib Brogan, a campaign director at Oceana, told me. 

The investigation will produce a report that will be used to inform talks between the U.S., Canada and Mexico on the matter, Seafood Source reports. 

In the meantime, scientists are still optimistic that right whales can make a comeback—as long as effective conservation measures are put in place. 

“The trajectory is headed towards extinction, but we can change that,” Redfern said. “They can still be around in my daughter’s lifetime for her to see and her kids to see. So I think that keeping hope is really important.” 

More Top Climate News

In Southern California, rain is on the forecast for this weekend, which could help douse some of the fires still raging through the area. Some experts are concerned that heavy rains could trigger mudslides, but precipitation is not expected to reach those levels during the weekend showers, The New York Times reports. If it does, another area of concern is that the debris and ash littering the streets of Los Angeles could mingle with floodwater, creating a toxic mix of pollution. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization could hinder efforts to combat climate-fueled disease spread, Zoya Teirstein reports for Grist. As temperatures warm, diseases like dengue and Zika are popping up in many places where they have not historically been common. Humans increasingly encroaching on forests and closer to wildlife are also worsening the risk of zoonotic disease spillover. Without global coordination, combating environment-related illnesses will be more difficult, experts say. 

“We live in a globalized world and diseases know no boundaries,” Jonathan Patz, inaugural director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Grist. “If we take this myopic view of disease prevention and ignore the rest of the world, we do so at our own peril.” 

Trump’s “Energy Emergency” declaration, which I wrote about on Tuesday, could allow federal departments to expedite energy projects and bypass regulatory processes under the Endangered Species Act, which may threaten wildlife across the U.S., Patrick Whittle reports for The Associated Press. The executive order includes language that would convene a committee—known colloquially as the “God Squad”—to “identify obstacles to domestic energy infrastructure specifically deriving from implementation of the ESA or the Marine Mammal Protection Act.” Environmentalists are concerned that fast-tracking energy projects without factoring in the potential risks to endangered plants and wildlife could lead to more extinctions amid a preexisting crisis of biodiversity loss, but questions remain for how the committee will work in practice, E&E News reports.

On Tuesday, I pointed to news about student climate activist Muhammad Zain Ul Haq, who is facing deportation to Pakistan from Canada on Saturday, Jan. 25, and whose first fight against deportation we covered in April.

My colleague Keerti Gopal has an update: On Thursday, Haq and his wife, Sophia Papp, announced that his application for spousal sponsorship—submitted nearly two years ago—was just denied by the Canadian immigration and citizenship department. Haq’s lawyer, Randall Cohn, told ICN that he believes the refusal of their application is an “extreme departure from conventional practice,” given Haq’s marriage and the lack of threat to public safety that he poses, and expressed concern that the department has not met its legal obligations in considering Haq’s application.

Now, the couple’s only option to keep Haq in Canada is another intervention by Minister of Immigration Marc Miller to delay Haq’s removal in order to ensure that his procedural rights have not been violated. Climate activists and legal experts have spoken out against Haq’s deportation, and are encouraging supporters to reach out to Miller and urge him to intervene before the Saturday removal date.

In an emailed statement, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada communications advisor Julie Lafortune wrote that IRCC determined Haq did not meet the requirements for spousal sponsorship.

“A decision to remove someone from Canada is not taken lightly,” read Lafortune’s statement. “Every individual facing removal is entitled to due process, but once all avenues to appeal are exhausted, they are removed from Canada in accordance with Canadian law.”

A new study reveals that North Pacific loggerhead sea turtles have shifted their foraging northward at a rate six times faster than the average for most marine species since 1997. Part of the reason for this shift is climate change, as the turtles react to warming temperatures and find food in new areas of the ocean, according to the research. 

The good news: “At least in the short term, I expect the turtles to be able to adapt effectively,” study co-author Larry Crowder, a professor of oceans at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability, said in a post. “They seem to be able to keep up and stay in the habitats that provide them with the most food.”

This story was updated Jan. 24, 2025, with a statement from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.